Tag Archives: impact

REF and the changing face of Academia

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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A while back I was doing a roundtable discussion for the Religious Studies Project and during the discussion one of the participants, Kevin Whitesides, refused to be allowed to be confined to a particular “box”. As is the way of this sort of thing myself and a couple of the other participants turned this into a running joke that Kevin doesn’t wear hats. Unlike Kevin the rest of us are quite happy to wear our academic hats that mark us out as anthropologists, sociologists, phenomenologists or whatever.

I happen to like my phenomenology hat and I imagine all those that do wear hats enjoy wearing them too. In fact our hats are quite important to us, putting on a hat helps us approach our subject because contained within our hats is a wealth of background knowledge. More exactly while I’m wearing the phenomenology hat, it determines the way in which I go about studying my subject. In a similar fashion if I were to wear the sociology hat I would go about my subject in a very different fashion. Now, to talk about wearing or not wearing a hat has always had the flavour of a joke but recently Michael Marten wrote on this blog about the encroaching REF and I started thinking about the wearing of hats in a more serious fashion.

The REF is meant to develop “overall quality” profiles of various departments to assess how much funding they should be recieving and sifting through the website which is sparsely detailed you can find the criteria for assessement here. The overall profile has five levels, four stars to no stars, that will determine how much money a department is due. Stars are awared according to the “quality” of the work an institution provides. I have placed quality in scare quotes because quality is a highly subjective terms and the REF does its best to assess this in terms of the department’s “originality”, “significance” and “rigour”, another set of highly subjective terms that have no definition whatsoever on the REF website. However, these terms don’t really need definition for REF because really the quality profile is determined by three further subprofiles, all graded from four stars to no stars, entitled “Outputs”, “Impact” and “Environment”. Of these three subprofiles “Outputs” occupies a whopping 65% of the overall profile and this again repeats the terms of “originality”, “significance” and “rigour” and again there is no definition as to what is meant.

What I suspect is that “Outputs” will have very little to do with “originality”, “significance” or “rigour” at all. It’s hard to see in fact how the words connect with one another. The title of this subprofile is a quantitative word suggesting that what this subprofile is concerned with is the amount of content a department can produce in a given amount of time. This association is all the more obvious when you notice that it is “Outputs” and not “Output” which is the only plural title among the profiles and sub-profiles on REF. Yet the criteria for this subprofile are all qualitative words which puts them at odds with the quantitative overtone of the profile title. There is no such thing as an originality scale where you can number your work on a scale of one to ten, and even if you could originality is one of the most elusive qualities to be found in academic work. Speaking personally I am acutely aware that more often than not the brilliant ideas I come up with have already been had by some previous scholar. But this does not as such invalidate the work that I do and certainly some of the best work going on right now is building upon what others have already done. Not everything needs to be original in order to be good.

There is a tension between quality and quantity and its one I feel quite regularly. In another podcast I found myself quite intimidated by Carole Cusack’s take on getting a job in academia when she advocated a much higher output of material than I have so far achieved in the second year of my Phd. And having attempted to increase that level of output I’m certainly feeling the strain as various commitments have ground together as they vie for supremecy (book reviews, article publications, tutoring, Taekwondo, my job, the actual thesis itself…). As Nietzsche pointed out, a person led by many virtues will find themselves in situations where those very virtues tear them apart. REF intends to exacerbate this situation by expecting four outputs (articles) by each researcher for each of its submissions. The chances of my getting two “outputs” done by the time I finish my Phd are slim at best but that’s what REF expects. Eventually the choice will have to be made to go with either quantity or quality because I doubt very few people would be able to successfully manage both. And ironically if REF pays attention to the level of journal your “outputs” are going to then the situation becomes ever more difficult. In order to reach the four “outputs” the researcher would have to scimp on quality and thereby send their “outputs” to lower end journals only to have REF deny them because the “quality” isn’t high enough. Admittedly I should temper this by pointing out that four is the maximum “outputs” expected of a researcher for a submission. But with funding becoming scarcer and competition fiercer I wonder how long it is before four becomes the minimum.

There are signs that departments are beginning to favour quantity over quality as pointed out by Michael Marten already which is why I started off speaking about hats. What it comes down to is that in an effort to work REF and get as much money out of it as possible we are starting to take off our hats, but unlike Kevin who refused to wear a hat we are putting on a new hat. The REF hat. What I see with the emerging REF is that people are going to start to cast off our sociological, anthropological and phenomenological hats because these hats won’t gain an institution any money.

It may seem as if there is some defence against this when we look at the neat little categories that make up the 36 units of assessment. But do departments really fit into nice neat little boxes like that? Departments that straddle the nice neat units of assessment (like this one) will suddenly find themselves in danger because they don’t fit so easily. We might be called Critical Religion, but the work done here and by those departments like us covers all 36 of the REF’s units. We belong nowhere and everywhere, and even though our work can and does cover many units this is not likely to score us any points – quite the contrary. If funding is determined by unit and a department covers multiple units it is at a disadvantage because it is not clear which unit it should draw from. Could it mean that when applying for funding in one area, this will be denied because the department doesn’t match all the criteria for that unit? And the danger is that when the pressure’s great and the money’s thin we’ll allow ourselves to remove our hats and wear the REF hat as the only way to survive. But what would the cost of that really be? What sort of work can any department achieve when it is fenced into a little box with no room to manoeuvre of its own accord? Unfortunately, we may find out in 2013/2014…

Creativity, academia and Critical Religion

17 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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It is widely acknowledged amongst those who still care that academia in the UK is in very serious trouble.  The most infamous embodiment of the current malaise is a mechanism imposed upon universities by successive Westminster governments: a system of ‘research assessment’ driven by an ideology of neo-liberal commodification.  Until 2008 it was called the Research Assessment Exercise; it now operates under the equally Orwellian name of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  Readers fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the blight that is the REF may need an explanation: universities submit publications by their scholars to subject-oriented panels of academics, who will assess their relative ‘excellence’, awarding them scores from 1-4 to indicate just how ‘excellent’ they really are.  An accompanying ‘environment’ narrative describing how wonderful these scholars’ departments are is also assessed, as are so-called ‘impact studies’ (the devising of specious measurements of the supposed ‘impact’ of academic work upon non-academics, an idea that barely works in the classical sciences, never mind the humanities).  From all this, an overall score for the department will be given.  That score, in turn, will determine the funding that the state gives each university, though perversely, the exact methodology for that decision has not (yet) been made public.  Of course, many academics and most university bureaucrats have strong vested interests in these outcomes.

The broader ramifications of the REF are apparent in numerous contexts, long before the REF submission deadline at the end of 2013.  Most universities appear to have appointed yet more managers, directors and deputy principals whose primary responsibility is to maximise their institution’s overall score for the REF.  It goes without saying that many of these people are on salaries that far exceed those of the academics they are supposed to be ‘helping’.  Varying levels of competency, transparency and accountability characterise such institutional engagement, as conversations with almost any UK academic will verify.  The REF and its implementation corrodes the UK academic environment on all levels: for example, Phil Davis shows how citation records are being falsified in order to improve the supposed relevance of texts.

One of the most important elements of academic thinking to suffer in this context is interdisciplinarity.  The REF’s structures barely cope with scholars who cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as those working in Critical Religion.  A quick look through the list of scholars involved in the CRA highlights the nature of the boundaries issue: literature, gender, law, postcolonial studies, art, history, politics, philosophy, music, and a raft of other disciplinary descriptors feature prominently.  Critical Religion is in substantial part about questioning the boundaries and categories that are seen to exist in different contexts, and related to that, to interrogate the power relations underpinning these categories – who benefits from categorisations and whose position is strengthened by maintaining them?  Whether this be about interrogating ‘politics’ (e.g. here) or ‘gender’ (e.g. here) or ‘interreligious issues’ (e.g. here or here), there are innumerable categories that cannot simply be maintained in their present form without distorting the nature of human relationships.  This thinking has its origins in ‘religious studies’, but perhaps the Critical Religion Association should have been called the Critical Categories Association!

These crossings form an integral part of the creative process.  I have written here before on interdisciplinarity: it often involves a kind of creative thinking that needs a certain kind of space to be available.  No scholar I know can squeeze meaningful engagement with their research into half-an-hour between lectures.  Creativity needs a different kind of space, a space that may well lead, for example, to a loss of a sense of time or awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.  In my own writing, I sometimes find myself working through the night on a chapter or an essay, not realising that I have completed 8 or 10 hours of intensive work – and outside it is becoming daylight again.  These creative periods can lead to substantial leaps forward that push in some way at previous understandings, giving birth to new ideas or imagining new ways of interpreting old problems.  As I have argued on my personal site, academic creativity is not substantially different to creativity in other contexts, though the forms it takes may differ.  Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi calls this ‘flow’ – the creative energy that enables us to engage our creativity to the full:

As Czikszentmihalyi explains, entering a state of creative ecstasy presupposes certain training and experience.  In an academic context, the degree pattern – undergraduate, taught postgraduate, and doctorate – is a way of developing this experience.  Creativity, however, also needs more than just technical prowess, precisely because transgressing boundaries requires imagination: after all, the boundaries that we are seeking to overcome are frequently ossified and maintained (whether consciously or unconsciously) by vested interests.

The REF directly hinders this creativity, as do the endless funding applications we are expected to pursue (given the ridiculously low success rates, they’re largely pointless), the mindless form-filling for TRAC, and so on (Ross McKibbin eloquently describes some of the other manifestations of commodifying academia).  These are mechanisms ‘human resources’ management (HRM) deploys in order to control the transgressive creativity of academic research.  After all, although the REF ostensibly encourages ‘international level’ creativity that HRM desperately seeks to control, the REF’s regimentation of research activity maps onto HRM’s aims.  Hindering interdisciplinarity, requiring endless completion of ‘accountability’ exercises, and rewarding only certain kinds of work… all minimise the spaces needed for ‘flow’ – or even kill them off altogether.

And yet these things will not last: as David Jasper once remarked, we may one day be remembered for writing an important book, but we will not be remembered for our funding applications.  As the REF deadline draws ever nearer and overpaid managers exercise ever more unwanted pressure on academics, I sincerely hope that mechanisms of solidarity, perhaps through the union or the CDBU etc., can enable resistance to these attempts at commodification to flourish.  If we care about our universities, we need to resist, not least by constantly reaffirming that the preservation of creative ‘flow’ leading to boundary transgressions are the things that really matter.  In so doing, we may yet manage to subvert the rampant managerialism that is destroying higher education.

(I would be interested in comments that discuss more specific ways in which this might happen…)

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Warm thanks to Jason Theaker (photographer and academic at Bradford University, who sent me the video link in relation to a discussion about this image and text), and to Alison Jasper and Richard Roberts for helpful comments on a draft text).

Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly: Impact or ‘Impact statements’?

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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In the run up to the next round of assessment in UK Universities (the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ or REF, 2014) research is routinely being framed in terms of its ‘excellent impact’ as well as its academic value and viability. Impact is defined as the research’s ‘excellent’ contribution to national UK ‘growth, prosperity and well-being’.
To improve their chances of getting a slice from the £3billion pie of research funding available, researchers must be able to produce evidence of this ‘excellence’; completing ‘impact statements’ that show what they are doing has changed or influenced lives, with an emphasis on lives outside the world of Higher Education and with more than a nod in the direction of government policy on economic and social benefits. 20% of the value of research submissions in 2014 will be related to this kind of measureable impact.
Patti Lather, an American cultural critic situated in the field of education, connects this notion – being presented as a matter of common sense – that academic research needs to be measured on the basis of a calculation of economic and social benefit, with a ‘turn to policy’ detectable now over a number of years and closely related to ‘neoliberalism with its managerial and instrumental demands’ (Lather, Engaging Science: Policy from the side of the Messy 2010). Whether or not it is true that – aside from policy makers – people are widely demanding measurable indications of knowledge as a transferable or exchangeable product from Universities in the UK – it is clear that these Universities have also had a long and proud tradition in the past, of fostering the kind of critical impact that throws ‘common-sense’ notions – about the nature of women as inferior to men and gender more generally as irreducibly heterosexual, for example – out of the window.

At the moment, UK Universities still appear on the surface of things at least, to be relatively upbeat about ‘impact statements’. For example, Dr Nadine Lewycky, Arts Impact Officer at Warwick University said recently that many researchers are already making a real impact. She was employed at Warwick University to help academics identify new ways of building ‘impact’ into their research and in the podcast, she claims all she was really doing in many cases, was helping her academic colleagues find the right language to make existing ‘impact’ more apparent in order to bring ‘academia into the public domain’.
Reading between the lines, however, this seems strongly to suggest that academics, are being required at the same time, to bring their research into line with a particular kind of language that defines knowledge in terms of a regulated domain or economy of transfer and exchange. The knowledge that is produced by research becomes framed as something essentially to be managed, measured and marketed. Ideas that academic research could also contribute to processes of individual or communal becoming, transformation or a matter of following the dictates of human curiosity in order to reveal something previously undisclosed or unsuspected or even as a means to great pleasure and delight, are increasingly likely to be met with raised eyebrows and the accusation that we are being naïve.

Common-sense dictates after all that people want to see what they’re getting for their tax-pounds – especially in a time of economic crisis – so ‘impact statements’ are one way to achieve the necessary transparency and accountability. But common-sense – which typically denies that there is any need for further analysis – is notoriously amenable to ideological manipulation. Common-sense dictates that taxpayers demand something they can see or point to for their tax-pound, yet this may not be true, or it may not be any more true than the fact that tax-payers also belong to complex networks of diverse and interrelated factors and forces in the context of which, determining what they want or need is a messy, untidy and hugely difficult business. What about our accountability to multiplicity and difference (Lather 2010, 14) to all those things that don’t fit neatly into the impact statement grid?

The idea that there is something wrong with an ‘impact imperative’ is not simply to dismiss the attempts of the research councils, or people like Dr Lewycky, to draw attention to the many wonderful things that are done in UK universities – for example, to help those who suffer from cancer or dementia or in all kinds of synergies with the work of the arts and forms of technology. Nor am I arguing that academics ought not to concern themselves with the lives and concerns of people outside their ‘ivory towers’. Arguably, it is very important to ‘reinscribe an applied edge to’ (Lather 2010, 28) the work we do. In this sense, being encouraged to go outside the university and talk with people about what we – collectively – do, can only be a good thing. The problem is the way in which the value of what we do via these processes is then being framed.

There are different ways to understand the impact of knowledge that is cultivated in Universities. Just to take one single example, in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir, Sorbonne-trained philosopher, posed the question ‘What is a woman?’ and came up with the disturbing answer that ‘she’ was effectively a male invention. A woman was not born as such – somehow ‘essentially’ female – but became one in conformity to the philosophical assumptions that framed the whole of European society and those global contexts colonized by it. The world was normatively male and women as well as men saw themselves very largely through the fantastical lenses of powerful men, buoyed up by the assumed superiority of their culture and education. Whatever could not be conformed to this view was dismissed; women were discounted as either bad or mad. Beauvoir’s book – The Second Sex – was controversial and upset people. It was scandalous and subversive. Yet within a couple of decades, these ideas had had an enormous impact and they were being widely applied in every conceivable context, ushering in a whole new wave of feminist thinking.

Armed with Beauvoir’s ideas for example, a brilliant and passionate young woman called Mary Daly turned her gaze on the Roman Catholic Church and its theology in the 1960s and came up with her own question: Why is the Church’s role in conditioning women so rarely referred to? Her answer, contained first of all in The Church and the Second Sex (1968) followed by a series of powerful discussions in subsequent books, was that philosophical assumptions that determined women’s value and role in life were woven into the very fabric of Christianity:

If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’ people, then it is in the ‘nature’ of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated.
Beyond God the Father (1973,13)

Yet like Beauvoir before her, Mary Daly ruffled feathers and upset people. Though she had her books published and was frequently ‘in the news’, she upset even feminists and her attempts to teach men and women separately caused a perfect media storm.

In an article in the Guardian published on the anniversary of Beauvoir’s birth, Toril Moi tells us that The Second Sex was both a source of inspiration and insight for countless women – ‘ “It changed my life!” is a refrain one often hears’ – but it was also a stumbling block, something many people including women and even feminist women ignored or rejected.

In other words, there are different ways in which to understand ‘impact’ than one that is determined through the collection of measureable, marketable data in response to a ‘common-sense’ demand for demonstrability. Beauvoir and Daly initiated debates that have extended over decades and their ideas have not always been found acceptance. Yet it would be crass to claim that these debates have not been profoundly important, affecting our understanding of what gender is all about and whose interests it has served in ways that now saturate the policy world of ‘equalities mainstreaming’ or ‘gender awareness’. In other words, whilst the direction of ‘impact statements’ is all about what the public is getting for its money, it says nothing about the bigger issues of impact that offend or contest common sense and sensibility and in which universities have always, in the past, taken a leading role.

Standing in between the demands of government and the demands of senior academics within the academy, the research councils must have a difficult balancing act to achieve. Yet it is hard not to feel that they are too compliant with the assumptions being promoted as common sense, that value is equivalent to the manageable and the marketable and that to have impact, university research must be measurable; from numbers of cancer survivors for ever increasing lengths of time to numbers/examples of citations, hits on websites, completed feedback forms, numbers of tickets purchased, books sold, tv & radio interviews broadcast, related primary school activities organized, blog entries written ……